To all our readers welcome back to the fourth week of production for Son of a Gecko. We were able feature complete our game and are moving onwards to our full alpha release next week. With this we hope to begin moving into optimization and to get full player feedback and finish our changes based on it.

Welcome back I'm Hayden McCormack one of the Game Designers for Son of a Gecko and the person primarily running the Itch.Io page. This week the team focused finishing our Alpha and have finished making the necessary adjustments for our (hopeful) Alpha release early next week! As always, our builds are available on the main page and if you like what you see, please fill out the feedback forms found in the download post. As always, I hope you look forward to our full release on December 8th.

Art - Recap

This week the artists were able to begin finishing off the final touches to the base assets for the entire game and will be able to move into updates and iterations upon it as well as moving into the Animations needed next week. This week the artists started completing both retopo of the models as well as rigging them up for Animations. The artists have also finished creating the base placeholder VFX for the game and have finished off the last of the environmental assets and their textures.

This week our artist Joaquin created the basic textures for the characters and has begun retopologising the Hippo.

Our artist Sol has redoing and updating many of the textures throughout the game (and even added a whole new starfish) and has gone through the process of baking the light for the level. Sol also created a dock group of Assets for the start of the level. Sol also added some SSAO to the game to make the game look even more detailed!

This week Joshua sculpted the town wall and gate, as well as retopologizing and unwrapping the Gecko playable character as well as rigged it for animation. Josh also was able to provide some needed playtesting by organizing a session at a school event.

Our artist William has finished the version 1 VFXs and will be able to begin iterating and updating them as necessary.

Our artist Chris has textured our bar and created many of our UI art.

Artists: Joaquin Gundry, Sol Blackshaw, Christopher Matthews, William Saunders, Joshua Mcalister

Design - Recap

This week the designers were focused on ensuring the feedback we received last week allowed us to update our game. We also were able to finish off our sounds and begin the process of adding them to the game (which will be done early next week!) as well as a finished version of our wave system, checkpoints, and Boss design. We also have begun working on creating a variation of the basic bird enemy.

David has added the Boss Phase system, the barrel pickups, updated the sand pathing and texture locations, created a dock for the level, camera adjustments, finished painting the environment. David also worked with me (Hayden) to follow feedback provided and have significantly shrunk the level.

Our designer Astro has finished creating our Sound Bank and has added them to the unity project. Astro has also begun creating the Bug Testing sheets for our Bug testing sessions for next week.

Alex our narrative designer was on vacation this week and took some needed time off. :)

Stephen has begun looking for UI fonts for the UI elements of the game, updated and iterated the QA forms, and conducted some more advanced playtesting.

This week I assisted David in going through one of the main feedback items we had received and massively shrunk the level. I created a variant bird enemy for testing (a far faster, but far squishier bird enemy), placed out the rock wall running along the level as well as the placement of the starfish set dressing throughout the level. With the smaller level I also went through and updated our invisible wall. Also created a Main Menu camera location with some assistance from David.

Designers: Hayden McCormack, Alex Dabkowski, Stephen Blake, David Caruso, Astro Alessi

Programming - Recap 

Our Programmers have been finalizing the base code for all our mechanics and have now started optimizing and ensuring they work, while also making the changes necessary to follow up on feedback provided.

Ryan has created the Boss Phase system, the final enemy barrel pickup, fixed our death animation bug, added our death/respawn scripts to the game as well as the respawn mechanic.

Dan has finished creating the Main Menu, Pause and Settings menus to the game and bug fixing them. He also has added the main UI elements to the main game.

Programmers:  Ryan Horwood, Daniel Woodhouse

I hope you enjoy what you see and come back again next week for the Week 4 Devlog to see our changes based on community feedback that we have started to receive. This has been Hayden McCormack of the Borg Studios team, see you all next week!